STEVE CORONELLA: Snowflake schools boomer dad in ways of the world

Monday

Sep 11, 2017 at 12:01 AMSep 11, 2017 at 4:35 PM

Steve Coronella

DUBLIN – A couple of weekends back I got buried in a blizzard of snowflake indignation.

The human weather front responsible for my discomfort came in the form of my son, who's 19 but resembles a snowflake about as much as I resemble George Clooney. It's a trait he's picked up from his mother's side of the family and developed on the hurling pitch.

Anyway, we were driving to a match and a radio item came on detailing the latest college protest by a group of students unsettled by the prospect of a speaker who didn't share their world view appearing on campus. I can't recall exactly what I said in response – I regularly talk back to the radio and television – but I'm sure it was an ungracious crack about the delicate nature of today's young people.

That's when the storm hit, triggered by my lame humor. After prefacing his remarks with some mild profanity, my son said: “We didn't crash the world economy. Twice! We're not the ones destroying the planet. That's your generation! We didn't elect Donald Trump president. You did that!”

I was simultaneously impressed and taken aback by my son's swift and merciless rebuttal. That's what happens, I suppose, when your household subscribes to Time magazine and keeps a shelf of books by Michael “The Big Short” Lewis (among many others) close at hand. The young ones start to accumulate facts and form opinions of their own.

In fairness, my son would appear to be on the same page as tech and digital culture writer Amelia Tait. Commenting in the New Statesman back in January, Tait said: “Not content with insulting us individually, however, baby boomers have also coined the expression 'Generation Snowflake' to tar everyone born in the Nineties with the same brush. This definition entered the "Collins English Dictionary" last year, and can be found, much like a reference to Hitler, in every internet argument.”

Of course, according to a much disputed quotation – “If you’re not a leftist or socialist before you’re 25, you have no heart; if you're one after 25 you have no head” – my son and his contemporaries are exactly where they should be at this point in their lives: self-assured bordering on smug, certain of their own tastes and beliefs to the point of being a smidge intolerant, yet open to innovative social and technological developments that their elders can't even begin to understand.

My son must have carried his parental pique onto the hurling field. He put in a massive performance in midfield, registering his team's first point of the second half and thus halting a succession of unanswered scores from the opposition. In other words, a decidedly un-snowflake demonstration that contributed to a hard-fought victory on the day.

On the ride home I steered clear of any provocative topics – Trump, Brexit, North Korea – and instead focused on a subject he knows something about, despite our distance from Boston.

“How about them Sox?” I said. And then turned the car radio to a classics hit station we could both agree on.

Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of “Designing Dev,” a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who runs for the Irish presidency. His latest book is “Entering Medford – And Other Destinations.”

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Irish Olympics scandal highlights need

for Games reform

DUBLIN – A much anticipated report into alleged ticket touting by Irish resale agents at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio was published this week, revealing among other things that the Olympic Council of Ireland showed “more concern for the commercial interests” of its authorized ticket reseller “than for the interests of the athletes, their friends, relatives and supporters or those of the spectating public.”

In fact, not only were tickets intended for athletes' families passed on for resale, but after the Games had concluded, “a total of 223 tickets remained in a safe in the OCI's offices in Brazil,” according to Irish Times journalist Sarah Bardon.

The so-called Moran Report, undertaken by a retired High Court judge, was prompted by the arrest of former Irish Olympics boss Pat Hickey last summer in Brazil on charges of ticket touting, forming a criminal association/cartel, and illicit marketing by Brazilian authorities.

In December Hickey posted a $475,000 bond payment. He is currently in Ireland awaiting his return to Brazil for trial.

Though not remotely on the same scale as former FIFA head Sepp Blatter's legal difficulties, the wider sports world should take note of Hickey's troubles. Given that even a country as small as Ireland has an Olympics gravy train, is it time to face up to the rottenness at the heart of the modern Games?

Just as Boston did in 2015, when organizers withdrew the city's bid for the 2024 Summer Games in the absence of a guarantee from Mayor Marty Walsh that Hub taxpayers would cover any cost overruns. After their own initial enthusiasm Budapest, Hamburg, and Rome also backed out, recognizing the folly of staging the quadrennial five-ring circus.

Of course, every few years we hear the pitches from presidents and prime ministers, pop sensations and movie stars, all boasting in their inimitable fashion about the unique advantages of their preferred city. And the world's biggest companies, broadcasters, and sports organizations are happy to play along with the theatrics of the selection process and the overblown spectacle of the Games.

After all, as with soccer's bloated World Cup competition, it's not the matches or races that matter but the marketing possibilities.

So it will take a grassroots revolt among the athletes themselves if the Games are to be overhauled. Otherwise, the thousands of swimmers, runners, gymnasts and figure skaters who adorn the premier Olympic events run the risk of becoming unwitting – and uncompensated – corporate shills.

With Paris now lined up for 2024, preceded by Tokyo in 2020 and followed by Los Angeles in 2028, the Summer Olympics can be transformed into something different, scaled back but still classy, with athletes perhaps providing clinics for disadvantaged kids in the host city.

And who knows: maybe every Irish Olympian will get a handful of tickets for family and friends while their former boss is squinting through his binoculars from the cheap seats.

(END)

Medford native Steve Coronella has lived in Ireland since 1992. He is the author of Designing Dev, a comic novel about an Irish-American lad from Boston who runs for the Irish presidency. His latest book is entitled Entering Medford – And Other Destinations.

What's in a name? Plenty, even after 25 years in Ireland

by Steve Coronella

DUBLIN – When I moved to Dublin 25 years ago, my assimilation wasn't as straightforward as you might think. Even though I enjoyed an extensive network of Cork relations thanks to my emigrant grandparents Madge and Bill Reardon, who settled in Cambridge as newlyweds around 1930, this counted for little.

For starters, I had trouble finding work. In the summer of 1992, Ireland's celebrated Celtic Tiger economy had yet to roar, and with unemployment at 14 percent there wasn’t much call for an uprooted Boston guy on the wrong side of 30 whose only official certification was an undergrad English degree.

Fair enough. I wasn't about to quibble when thousands of men and women born and educated in Ireland were leaving the country to look for work.

What I didn't bet on when I arrived, however, was that my garden-variety Italian surname would confuse – and indeed amuse – the natives. For instance, I was regularly called Steve “Cornetto” – after a popular ice cream treat – and it was commonly assumed that I knew the likes of Tony Soprano personally. (If only. I would have jumped at the offer of a “no-show” job on a Celtic Tiger construction site.)

But that was then. Or so I'd like to believe. Unfortunately, despite the great strides Ireland has made in embracing different cultures and orientations over the last couple of decades, my name remains a problem for the linguistically-challenged here.

Case in point: during the course of a recent Gaelic football game, my son had to give his name to the match official. He'd received a yellow card for some off-the-ball “argy-bargy” with an opposition player and his transgression had to be duly recorded.

Now admittedly, my son had a gum shield (mouth guard) in his gob, but I've heard him speak with it in and he's easy enough to understand. Anyway, after several failed attempts to take down the spelling of Coronella, the ref gave up. “I'll just get your name from the team sheet,” he told my son.

Likewise, back in the spring a college information packet arrived to our house, addressed to my son. It had been generated by an email exchange – not a phone conversation. This detail is important. Despite documentary evidence of my son's correct name being readily available, the envelope bore the name – you guessed it – Brian Connelly.

In fairness, this incident does have an amusing throwback element to it. Years ago a Medford friend's Cork-born grandmother regularly called me Steve Connell. When Lal Connolly discovered my name was in fact Coronella and I had Italian blood running in my veins, she was dumbstruck. “No,” she said, as if I'd been operating undercover in her home for years.

Of course, you'd assume that the Irish of all people would be familiar with foreign names. After all, thousands of Emerald Isle natives populate multi-ethnic US cities like New York and Boston, where polysyllabic surnames much harder to pronounce than my melodic Sicilian moniker are commonplace.

Plus, Ireland has an indigenous language – taught on a compulsory basis to every schoolkid up to the age of 18, regardless of interest or aptitude – that even a world-class linguist would find incomprehensible at first glance. For instance, try pronouncing the names of these distinguished members of the Irish language media: Ailbhe O Monachain and Donncha Mac Con Iomaire. Then, for extra credit, have a guess whether they're male or female.

That's what I'm up against.

So all I'm asking, after a quarter century here, is for my Irish paesani to take a breath, look at the name carefully, and then repeat after me: CORONELLA.